Aus: 'THINK ON THIS A response to the NSW Teachers Federation’s public stance on the teaching of reading'

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Aus: 'THINK ON THIS A response to the NSW Teachers Federation’s public stance on the teaching of reading'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

This is yet another MUST READ piece.

Kirsten Duncombe, Learning and Support Teacher, takes a 'critical thinking' slant on the reading debate - and comments, "Effective literacy instruction is too important an issue for any of us to take a public or professional stance on without having done our homework. Have we engaged in wide reading and research on this issue, from both sides of the divide? And are we modelling best practice critical thinking methodology that would do our students proud?"

Our IFERI site shows over and again - through historic and current research-evidence, leading-edge practice and critical thinking - that we have a major, global problem with regard to reading instruction practices.

This includes problems with initial teacher-training; long-standing and popular flawed literacy programmes; mistrained or untrained teachers in reading and spelling instruction; widespread weak or flawed teaching and learning practices; provision based on beliefs, philosophies and unambitious mindsets rather than research findings; the same publishers producing contradictory literacy material under their own label; wide-scale unnecessarily high levels of 'dyslexia' in the English language; vociferous ongoing debate laying bare that teachers' professional understanding and children's literacy provision is based on 'chance' and NOT on the wealth of available research-evidence; widespread misunderstanding about the nature of the English spelling system and how best to teach reading and spelling amongst the general public, the teaching and teacher-training profession, literacy organisations, politicians, children's authors, and teachers' union leaders.

This mess is a huge problem.

As Kirsten points out in her very important article, is everyone discharging their duty, however, when it comes to their stance in the reading debate?
THINK ON THIS

A response to the NSW Teachers Federation's public stance on the teaching of reading
https://kirstenduncombe.wordpress.com
...It is notable that the NSW Teachers Federation has recently weighed in on matters of effective literacy instruction. Specifically, the NSW Teachers Federation commissioned Sydney University Professor Robyn Ewing to write a report on the teaching of reading. This report, published in mid-2018 and entitled Exploding Some of the Myths about Learning to Read, was commissioned after a departmental research paper was published that supported an emphasis on synthetic phonics when teaching reading. In her paper, Robyn Ewing makes clear her belief that phonics in context, as already embedded in most initial teacher training programs, and as currently practised in the majority of primary schools across Australia, is enough.

It is not my intention here to weigh in on the specifics of this ongoing debate.

Instead, I wish to come at this from the perspective of a subject close to the heart of all of us in education: critical thinking.

Carl Sagan wisely noted that “science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge”. This quotation dovetails nicely with the Oxford dictionary’s definition of critical thinking as “the process of analysing information in an objective way, in order to make a judgement about it”.

One of our 21st Century teaching objectives is to foster and reward critical thinking in our students, preparing them, in as much as we ever can, for the unique challenges that the coming decades will bring. It is only fitting, then, that we hold ourselves, and each other, to high standards in this domain also, actively engaging in, and acknowledging, critical thinking methodology.

If the NSW Teachers Federation, or anyone else for that matter, wants to comment or advise on the place of systematic synthetic phonics in early reading instruction, it is imperative that they first acquaint themselves with the research and the theory on both sides of the debate.
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: Aus: 'THINK ON THIS A response to the NSW Teachers Federation’s public stance on the teaching of reading'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

It is relevant to Kirsten's piece raising the issue of who is equipped to apply 'critical thinking' in the reading debate to follow this with Professor Pamela Snow's piece (also posted elsewhere on the IFERI forum) which provides the evidence of either lack of critical thinking or wilful refusal or failure to acknowledge and implement the findings of research. Teachers are having to set out on 'their own journeys of discovery' rather than being informed and trained to the highest standards of evidence-informed reading instruction.

Pam is right that this is a 'social justice issue' - and it has been for many, many years:
It’s time for a Reading Renaissance

This article has been reproduced with permission from The Professional Educator, October 2018, special edition: The Great Literacy Debate (pp. 37-40)

The recent Phonics Debate (Sydney, July 31) has acted as a crucible in which long-held and deeply committed views and antipathies have been exposed and stirred, possibly heralding a new chapter in a long-running, corrosive debate about early reading instruction.
http://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2018/10/ ... sance.html
Rather than an education knowledge-gap being the biggest hindrance to progress in early reading instruction, we must grapple with a wasteful knowledge-translation crisis. Such waste of knowledge is unforgivable and would not be tolerated in other fields, where reliably-established changes in knowledge transform into changes in practice as a matter of course.

There is abundant evidence to show that teachers (and in many cases their educators) in western nations such as Australia, the US, Canada, and the UK typically have limited and superficial knowledge of the linguistic basis of learning to read, and of the specific linguistic constructs that underpin this (Binks-Cantrell et al., 2012; Fielding-Barnsley, 2010; Fielding-Barnsley & Purdie, 2005; Hammond, 2015; Joshi et al., 2009; Louden & Rohl, 2006; Mahar & Richdale, 2008; Moats, 2009; Piasta et al., 2009; Podhajski , 2009; Reid Lyon & Weiser, 2009; Stark et al., 2015; Tetley & Jones, 2014; Washburn et al., 2011; Washburn & Mulcahy, 2014).

Even more worryingly, there is evidence of an inverse relationship between teacher language knowledge and self-confidence with respect to this knowledge (Stark et al., 2015). This severely undermines the extent to which the community can be confident in teachers as experts and professionals. The persisting strong-hold of Whole Language-based ideologies and practices in ITE and classrooms, means that early years teachers are stuck in a 1970s time-warp, while practitioners in fields such as speech pathology and educational and developmental psychology have moved on, using twenty-first century knowledge in their everyday work. Many teachers eventually have their own epiphany about gaps in their understanding and practices, entering into long, expensive journeys of discovery to claim their rightful body of knowledge. It should not need to be so.
Unfortunately, but inevitably, calls for effective reading instruction are political – in the sense that under-done reading skills are one of the surest paths to social marginalisation and economic disadvantage across the lifespan. Youth justice centres, adult prisons, public housing waiting lists, and mental health and substance abuse services all include an over-representation of citizens who did not learn to read in the early years of school (Snow, 2016). This is a social justice issue and if that makes it political, then so be it. Decades of presenting evidence and advocating for its translation into ITE and classroom practice have not resulted in change in education faculties or classrooms. Hence, like climate change and marriage equality, equitable access to evidence-based reading instruction needs to be debated and resolved in the political and public arena.
Flat earth thinking about reading instruction is not excusable in 2018. Sustained failure to adopt scientific knowledge and transmit it to its rightful custodians and beneficiaries is simply cosying up with pseudoscience.

It’s time to move from the Reading Dark Ages to a Reading Renaissance.
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